News Limited papers are abuzz with the news this morning that “Rudd is more likely to tell truth: voter poll” and that this means that “JOHN Howard has a major credibility problem”.
After the last election where “Trust” trumped “Truth” you’d have thought that journalists would know by now that electors think there are more important considerations than honesty when choosing a representative. In fact, an ability to be a good strategic liar might just be one of those things that they look for.
Howard is well behind in the polls. That allows him to run as the underdog against the mirage of a Rudd Government. At the same time, he is still comfortably rated the best on the economy, giving him a potent weapon to shepherd voters back to him.
The ALP National Conference next weekend will put the Rudd Government on display. It promises to be very much Howard Lite with little policy deviation from the status quo. There will be some impressively choreographed pyrotechnics from the left over IR and uranium which will be doused by Rudd in a demonstration of his “strength” and “character”. This demonstration that Rudd is ready to govern will put the microscope on him even more strongly, but the problem for Howard will be that on Rudd’s current policy settings there’s little to be scared of (although they wouldn’t want to have any more mistakes like the raid on the future fund for broadband).
It is in this context Rudd’s perceived honesty may be a problem for Howard. On Labor’s track record you’d expect them to say one thing to get elected and do another when they’re in office. But if Rudd continues to be held in high esteem policies may be accepted at face value.
No matter how strong Howard is on the economy, or how good a strategic liar he is seen to be, that is a major problem. Which means that the government is most likely to put in a lot more work on the issue of Rudd’s integrity.

I doubt whether Clarke and Dawe would take the gig, but John Howard ought to offer them a consultancy on political strategy. Last night’s 7:30 report segment finds the range on Rudd and makes some big hits.
First the frame:

JOHN CLARKE: Let me ask you a question Brian. Are we in this country thoroughly sick of being told what the agenda is and told what to think? Or Brian, do we take the view that we’re not children and we don’t need to be treated like children?
BRIAN DAWE: Yes, yes we do. But this is not what I asked you, Mr Rudd.
JOHN CLARKE: Am I interested in what you asked me Brian? Do I look as if I’m interested in what you asked me? Do I look as if I’m yearning for further information about what you actually asked me?

Then the execution:

BRIAN DAWE: I can’t do anything.
JOHN CLARKE: Is this, for example, am I just a conceited twerp you might ask.
BRIAN DAWE: Yes. Well…
JOHN CLARKE: That, Brian, that question is beneath you. You’re better than that Brian. These are very, very good questions.
BRIAN DAWE: He won’t shut up.

And then this morning on the ABC news website, as if on cue:

Mr Rudd says it is disturbing to hear that irrigators will not be able to draw water from the Murray-Darling system unless it rains soon.
“It’s not the Howard Government’s fault in itself, I mean Mr Howard can’t make it rain, I understand that,” he said.
“But for half a decade or more the Government has been in a state of denial on climate change and water.”

So, if only we’d signed-up to Kyoto there’d be enough water in the Murray-Darling for everyone. I think Clarke and Dawe could do a lot with that, especially as the impact of Kyoto on the emissions of CO2 has been, for all practical intents and purposes, zero. And then last year, the Labor Party view of the Murray-Darling appears to have been that we needed to release more water for environmental flows.

Reader and geologist Peter Ravenscroft thinks Brisbane’s dams might be leaking as much water as residents are drinking. It’s a speculative view, but one I thought worth publishing to see if anyone knows what the story is.
“Wivenhoe Dam seems to be leaking very seriously.
We may be losing nearly as much water as we are using in South East Queensland. Wivenhoe Dam is dropping far faster than it should be, going by the SEQWater monthly water release figures. In February, they released about 11,000 megalitres from that dam, according to their on-line releases graph.
But the dam dropped, according to their percentage decline rate graph, by 21,000 megalitres in March, as near as I can tell. I do not have the figures to compare within the same month.
What follows may explain the huge amount of missing water, and the discrepancy between the two sets of official figures. It needs to be checked rather carefully, and at every point. I have very imperfect data and am good at making mistakes. But I think the geology is sound and the numbers, I hope, are roughly so.
It seems that about 10,000 megalitres goes missing each month. The official evaporation rate for Wivenhoe is 1.8 metres a year. That should account for roughly 600 megalitres of evaporation a month: which leaves about 9,400 megalitres unaccounted for. A megalitre is not an extra large Coke bottle full, in spite of what your children may claim: it is a million litres. So 9.4 billion litres seems to be wandering off to parts unknown, each month.
That is largely why the government’s scheduling of water projects will fall short and the dams will run dry, if we do not get heavy rain. We are losing almost as much from Wivenhoe as we are using, in all of SEQ. To be more precise, we seem to be losing an extra 85 per cent on top of what we are using.
I cannot be certain, but if the official figures are correct I think the missing water is going around, and perhaps also under, the dam wall at Wivenhoe. That wall is built into Marburg Sandstone, on both sides. That was probably done to leave the Great Moreton Fault System to the east, for safety. On the Queensland Government 1:250,000 geology map, 1973 edition (which is still the best we have) it is called the “Great Moreton System” The word “Fault” was clearly edited out. It exactly labels the fault system that the Brisbane River follows, both to the north and to the south, though not at the wall.
Rivers very often follow faults, so dams often have to be built near them.
Nothing wrong or unusual there.
The Jurassic Marburg Sandstone, into one cliff and one hill of which the wall is set, is very permeable, that is, water leaks happily and easily through it. The proof of its permeability is that the government has drilled it a little way to the southwest, as an aquifer. Local farmers have pumped water from it for decades. Using it to hold back water is better than using a haystack, but not wildly so.
The dam level at present is about the same as that of the farmlands to the southwest. Any bore in that region, a far as Toowoomba, will draw down the water table and so will basically, I think, extract water from Wivenhoe.
Toowoomba is now pumping from below the range, so is effectively using Wivenhoe water already. All the farmers to the southwest with bores, ditto.
Some water will probably first move a short distance east, to the Great Moreton Fault System. Then south along the fault, and then west again, all along the huge surface provided by the fault having Marburg Sandstone on one side. The rest, I believe, will simply move due southwest through the rock on the western side of the dam wall.
If that is correct, some things could be done straight away.
We effectively, if I am right, have two good buckets and one with a huge leak. If water can now be piped to the North Pine Dam from Wivenhoe, that should be done. No water should be released from Somerset to Wivenhoe, except for immediate release to Brisbane and friends. And a pipeline, if one does not exist, should go in, to pump water back from Wivenhoe to Somerset.
As no roads have to be crossed, that could be done with multiple poly lines, diameter as big as can be rolled out, as many as needed.
I am not an engineer, but I suggest the western flank of Wivenhoe, in the section where the rock is Marburg Sandstone, should be clay-lined while the damn is so low. The best rock for that is the Bunya Phyllite, from the D’Aguilars just to the west of the dam. A big quarry can go in up one of the creeks there, and the material can be trucked over the wall. I would guess that the eastern side of the dam, near the wall, is too steep for clay-lining. It may need concrete shot-creting.
A sort of stop press. Linton Brimblecombe, a man with an infectious laugh and also the chair of the Lockyer Water Users Forum, has kindly informed me that they are not getting the missing water. Their aquifers are only partly linked and are now running out. Expect the price of vegies to climb rather steeply when that happens. He says their bores are now down to about 70 to 100 feet. He thinks maybe the Wivenhoe dam is not as big as they thought it was, so the problem is a survey one. If he is right, there may not be any missing water, we may just have a lot less than we thought we had, in reserve, which is still a problem.
Linton is probably right, the farmers may not be directly using Wivenhoe water since they have so little. If however water is being lost to the southwest and into the Great Artesian Basin the farmers are in fact drawing the dam down. It may be that it is decided to allow the use of boreholes to continue because the Lockyer Valley is a major food production area, which is fine. Otherwise they should be stopped and properly compensated. I would suggest Toowoomba be allowed to continue, as they have no alternative water source as yet. Their dams are nearly empty.
If you wish to check the geology, if you can get one, use the old paper map from the Mines Department, now part of the DNR. (1;250,000 Ipswich, SG 56-14, Geology, 1973). You will have to colour it in, as the government ran out of ink: unless a later one is coloured. The new online maps are un-usable gibberish, and did not show the geological cross section AB that is critical the last time I checked.”

Something’s been niggling me about the Rudd campaign, and now, thanks to the British Tories I know what it is. Rudd has just been fingered by Irwin Stelzner in this article in the Telegraph (thanks to Crikey for the tip), along with British Tory Leader David Cameron, as one of the new brigade in the Anglo-Sphere taking up the torch of JFK.
They may have some things in common, but Cameron has an approach which is quite different to Rudd’s. Take a look at this Party Election Broadcast, and compare it to the advertising we’ve seen so far from Rudd. In the Rudd ads he stands on his own, telling you about himself. In Cameron’s what you notice is the interaction between Cameron and other people.
This approach isn’t restricted to Rudd’s television ads. There’s a narcissistic scent about the sort of media he’s doing. It’s more reality TV, than politics, and the thing about reality TV is that it is narcisstic. You don’t go on Big Brother or Australian Idol, or Survivor because you want to do something for someone else. You do it for yourself.
But the reason that people vote for you is not because of who you are, but what you can do for them. Will Labor fine-tune its presentation, or will this be the blemish that pulls Rudd back to the field?

I now have the figures for the Liberal Party senate preselection result and they tend to indicate a complete collapse in the Santoro support base.
In the final ballot Sue Boyce had 142 votes and Bob Quinn 84. While Quinn was supported by Santoro, you can’t count all of those 84 as Santoro bloc.
Without going into the intricacies of the Liberal Party preselection voting system it is exhaustive preferential. There was one other serious candidate in the ballot, Dave Moore. Moore was eliminated in the second last ballot. At that stage he had 54, Quinn 67 and Boyce 108. 34 of Moore’s votes went to Boyce, and 17 to Quinn. Moore is not in the Santoro camp and Quinn would have received votes in his own right.
All of which means that the hard-core Santoro vote has collapsed almost completely. It has to be somewhere less than 67 votes out of 228. As Senate preselections are drawn from all over Queensland – 10 delegates from every federal electorate – this is a reasonably representative sample. So, in reality, at the moment Santoro’s rock-solid support is probably less than a quarter of activists in the total Liberal Party organisation.

Congratulations to Sue Boyce for her preselection as the Liberal Party’s new senator for Queensland. Without wanting to belittle Boyce’s victory, she was the obvious candidate, and she won despite the handicap of me tipping her as the most likely candidate!
Sad to see Bob Quinn defeated as the runner up – he didn’t need this codicil to an honourable political career. The fact that he lost convincingly is reassuing in that it indicates the size of the current rock-solid Santoro vote. It’s ironic that Quinn’s support came from Santoro given that most of Quinn’s first term as State Parliamentary Liberal Leader was spent fighting with the Santoro camp to reform the party organisation.
Lastly, a more pedantic note. News is reporting that “Boyce will be Queensland’s first female senator in 34 years.” Strange, but in 1982, a mere 25 years ago, I was employed by Queensland’s last female senator, Kathy Sullivan (then Martin). Sullivan didn’t leave the senate until 1984. It’s been too long, but not that long!

Santo Santoro has yet to resign from the Senate, and sources say that the President of the Senate has yet to even receive a letter from him advising when he will resign. In the meantime he continues to use government resources to this week mail party members glossy self-boosting publications and to lobby preselection delegates on their choice for a successor. He might even be using some of his time to set up his future career as a property developer, or to further his plans to travel to the US and Britain (see Daily Telegraph of 31/3/7 for the last).
When Santoro announced that he was resigning everyone assumed that it would be at the end of last week when parliament rose from its sitting. Here are Santo’s words:

I wish to advise the Senate that I will shortly resign from this august institution…I will make that advice formal at the end of these two week sittings giving both the Queensland Liberal Party and the Queensland Parliament time to appoint my replacement before the Commonwealth parliament again meets.”

On one reading he was going to resign at the end of the sittings, and on another he was going to advise of when he would resign, but as he has apparently yet to write to the President of the Senate he has done neither!
Paul Keating referred to the Senate as “unrepresentative swill” and there are some Senators who did their best to make it look more than a little swinish – for example the late Mal Colston. But Santoro is starting to make Colston look positively angelic.
Perhaps he will admit to another senior’s moment and protest that, despite turning up for work every day and using government resources to the full, it’s a simple oversight and he thought he had resigned last week. Perhaps when he does resign he can make it retrospective and reimburse that part of the public purse he is currently turning into a sow’s ear!